Yeah, everything Sirlin had done since the start of this campaign has pushed me forget away from buying future games._________________

DSMatticus wrote:

Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.

OK, double post because now there is a second locked thread -- this time it's a thread asking about how to talk about cards. Apparently that has to go.

The post in question was like a screen of text. It contains stuff like:

Quote:

It's a 1/6 for 3, in one of the weaker tech II suites, and it has the ability 'when a UNIT takes combat damage from GatG, disable it.'

Quote:

I think most people agree that this is one of the weakest tech II's,

Quote:

I know Sirlin doesn't want to change any cards, and I understand the reasoning.

The author hedges their suggestions, they give reasoning, and they're pretty respectful. Responses include this, from one of the guys involved in logistics (IIRC):

LK404 wrote:

So yeah, feel free to keep the discussion going and debate the merits of whether Guardian of the Gates is a good card or a terrible card or whatnot, but just know that it won't be changing. Codex has already been sent to the printers for manufacturing. Sorry!

The posts following it are pretty normal discussion. This looks like a post I could take or leave. Then somebody decides to write:

Quote:

This thread is very toxic and Codex has only been out for like two months. We shouldn't talk about any cards being good or bad.

And all of a sudden the conversation shifts to people apologizing and hedging even more. Nobody said the designer sucks, nobody said the game as a whole sucks, nobody has suggested anything other than one edit to the card in the OP. But when Sirlin talks about why he closed the thread, he tells a different story:

Sirlin wrote:

Compare this to: "X card is wtf bonkers weak. Did anyone even test this game? I don't understand why there are crap cards in the game. Probably it's for [insert X reason that implies the developers are idiots or assholes]. Also, let's create our own version of the game with this card different so we could even play something decent."

Holy misrepresentation, batman. Another gem:

Sirlin wrote:

It's time to put on your player hats, rather than designer hats basically

"How dare you even insinuate that I'm not good at game design. You are a dirty peasant player, you only get to play the game."

Like... wow. And this is next to two threads where someone designed an entire spec. I guess that's just wearing your player hat? And the main (declared) reason for closing those threads is that it's bad publicity. Apparently trolling and being a disingenuous ass is A-OK by the PR department, but god forbid we say bad things about a product.

TLDR: Somebody asks for feedback about a card, and suggests changes to it, because they think it's weak. Sirlin closes the thread. The OP pushes for clarification in another thread, where Sirlin says they were too mean. He closes that thread too._________________

DSMatticus wrote:

Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.

Kaelik wrote:

I invented saying mean things about Tussock.

Last edited by ...You Lost Me on Mon Apr 11, 2016 9:37 pm; edited 1 time in total

If you make a game with a lot of moving parts, you have to accept errata as a part of life. Collectible card games can often get away with printing new cards and banning old cards to effectively stealth errats things. Like how in Magic you aren't allowed to play Ancestral Recall but you are allowed to play a card that is identical but has suspend 4. The second version is much worse and was printed later as a "fixed" version.

For a non-ccg, you just have to bite the bullet and errata the actual game components. 3e DnD polymorph is too powerful so you have to ban it or change it. The Monk is too weak, so you have to use Dungeonomicon Monk instead. And so on.

In a game like Codex, you need to either accept that the specs are going to shake out into tiers and hope that the top tier has enough different specs in for the meta to remain interesting, or hand out regular errata to smack down overperformers and boost underperformers. Throwing a temper tantrum because someone figured out that one spec or another has a win percentage that is too high or too low is asinine.

It's time to put on your player hats, rather than designer hats basically

"How dare you even insinuate that I'm not good at game design. You are a dirty peasant player, you only get to play the game."

So... Discussing strategy and deck building isn't a thing a player should do ? Is it a strategy game ?

I mean, if the game is totally random-based, there's no point into discussing strategy; what's important is the game experience. But if there's strategy involved, some people will discuss about the efficient strategies, how to implement them, how to counter them. And someone will eventually say "if you're using that strategy, you shouldn't use this card". And at some point, someone will notice that some cards are weak in every existing strategy. Which is exactly the same as "this card is underpowered". That's a thing that will always happen if you're talking as a player of a strategy game, because your role as a player is to find the good strategies.

So, I still want to talk about Codex -- and as it has now become apparent that I cannot do so honestly on the official forums, I will have a lot more to say here.

So continuing my list of MtG "problems" that Codex attempted to fix:

Issue #4: Card flow and the decisiveness of top decking

In MtG you start with a hand of 7 cards and nothing in play. You then draw one card each turn and will usually play multiple cards per turn until something like turn 7 of the game, after which you have a nearly-empty hand (unless you set up combos for extra card draw). This means that in games where both opponents opening hands negate each other, the game is frequently decided by who can draw the next useful card from the top of their deck. In some ways, this is an inevitable consequence of using a deck of cards in a game, but it can feel anti-climactic and luck-based, so people complain about it, and Codex does card flow very differently.

Codex's card flow model is based more on Dominion than MtG. Much like Dominion, you start with a 10-card deck, you discard your unplayed cards at the end of each turn, and then you draw a new hand. And, like Dominion, you are expected to cycle your deck several times, seeing new cards each cycle. This is completely different from MtG's setup where you start with a 60 card deck and (generally) lose the game when you reach last card. What Codex does differently than either of those, is to have the size of the new hand based on the number of unplayed, unworkered cards you discarded. You have a (normal) maximum hand size of 5, but you only draw a number of cards equal to two plus the number of cards you discarded. So if you play your entire hand, you will only draw 2 cards next turn, but if you stick to the generally safer plan of making one worker and playing one card from hand, then you get to draw 5 cards again.

This looks neat at first -- it seems like the tradeoff is between how much to invest in establishing board position right now and how much to save in order to maintain a reasonable spread of options later. Games being decided by topdecking still happens, but many of those situations can be excused by post-game analysis pointing out that if one or the other of the players had played one more or one fewer cards on a prior turn then the draw would have worked out differently.

However, it interacts very very strongly with the Deckbuilder cycling and Tech improvement systems of the game. Remember that your starter deck is all Tech 0 units,buildings, upgrades and minor spells, and you have to draft the higher-Tech and therefore outright better units, buildings, upgrades and spells into your deck during the course of play. This means that playing multiple cards (more than one Card played + one card Workered from your hand) not only reduces the size of your future hands, but also delays the time it takes to cycle your deck and therefore increases the number of turns before you see those higher tech cards. This completely invalidates any potential of an MtG-style MtG "weenie rush" strategy - which requires playing multiple cheap creatures early, and combining with early removal options and/or "buff all my creatures" effects and hoping to overwhlem the opponent while their bigger, more expensive, better-in-the lategame cards are still sitting in their hand - and it invalidates that strategy at the global-rules design level, not at the specific card design level. Please recall my comment from point #3 in my prior post about MtG "problems" codex attempts to fix:

myself, one page back wrote:

This means that unlike (at least some formats of) MtG, you do not have really have the option of playing a slower deck which plays bigger creatures hoping that being more card-efficient makes up for being less mana-efficient

So things shake out such that Codex's general game rules support neither the general strategy of playing multiple cheaper mana gold-cost efficient cards nor the general strategy of playing fewer expensive card-efficient cards. Codex's game design wants you to drop exactly one card-from-hand and one land worker each turn. There are exceptions to this: Heroes, Extra draws, combos powerful enough to be worth the strategic drawback; but as a general design it makes mana curve paramount: you want to play exactly one card each turn, and you want it to cost exactly the amount of gold you are producing on the turn you play it.

Bonds : Investment Time Strategy

And now it's time for a cheap shot. Here's an actual card:

Note that the effect is what the global rules strongly encourage anyways, so most of the time what this card does is prevent your opponent from making a poor strategic choice. Note that it's also in exactly the same Spec and Tech level as Guardian of the Gates. So yeah, you're pretty-much fucked if you ever pick Law II in an actual game - but not nearly as fucked as you are if you try to point that out on the official forum for this game.

Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Tue Apr 12, 2016 9:48 pm; edited 7 times in total

Wow. Censorship Council is really bad. Like, it doesn't even make sense how bad that card is. Even if it was free it would be bad, because playing a bunch of cards on one turn slows down your deck cycling for the rest of the game.

That draw mechanic is incredibly brutal towards playing even a second card on any turn ever. Telling your opponent that they can't play a second card isn't even a thing.

Realistically, Censorship Council is a specific countermeasure to a couple of niche strategies involving drawing a bunch of extra cards

Any decks running Demonology can cast this on Turn 2

Since it's an upkeep effect, you can't actually benefit from this earlier than turn 3

But each of those can come online a full cycle (multiple turns) before Censorship Council, meaning that it's a really slow counterplay and a lot less efficient than just killing your opponent's heroes what allow for card draw.

However since mortgaging your future is a valid tactic when there is no future left in the game, it's probably supposed to be lock to prevent an opponent from dumping their hand for the win, or to prevent them from counterplaying your hand-dump for the win with their own.

And yet, the primacy of the mana curve in this game's strategy means that it's rare players will even draft cards to set up a potential hand-dump, making the things it counters all edge cases. As in Codex, the opportunity costs of drafting in any specific Tech II card are really hefty - Censorship Council is unbelievable weak. It's not merely niche, but it's weak within that niche, and has really hefty costs to play.

Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Tue Apr 12, 2016 9:53 pm; edited 4 times in total

So a 4-gold, tech 2 card can be a countermeasure for a 0-gold, tech 0 card ? How does that work ? Does Law have some green-like turbo-gold/turbo-tech stuff ?

Well, it can be a countermeasure for a strategy tat uses a tech 0 gold 0 card. If you play card draw you necessarily have to have your curve set up to play multiple cards a tirn. So if something happens where you can't do that, you're stuck with a hand full of shit you can't play and a pile of gold doing nothing. But as I understand it, everyone gets a mana sink in the form of levelling heroes, so that kind of prison strategy basically can't work.

So a 4-gold, tech 2 card can be a countermeasure for a 0-gold, tech 0 card ? How does that work ? Does Law have some green-like turbo-gold/turbo-tech stuff ?

As I pointed out above, it works very poorly. And while Law I does have two-very-rare-outside-of-green gold gain options, it's largely the opposite of Turbo resource, and is instead heavy on defensive stall and lategame control options.

Yeah, note the air quotes in that heading. I'm only bringing it up because of this tool: Link to BGG review who seems to think that the defender has too big an advantage in MtG. While he's right in that Codex favors the attacker much more, he's also the first person I've heard say that defensive advantage in creature combat was somehow a problem in MtG.

Now I really want to just post a bunch of eyeroll smilies in response to that assertion, but Codex's design decisions are worth going over here.

To begin with, a refresher on how "creature combat" works in Codex. The attacker attacks with a single Unit or Hero at a time, and has to select an opposing Unit, Hero, or Building to attack. The attacker picks all matchups - subject to just a few limitations. Firstly, if the defender has anything in their Patrol Zone, the attacking unit or hero cannot attack any units, heroes or buildings behind the patrol zone (unless the attacking unit/hero has an appropriate evasion ability) Secondly, if the defender has a unit or hero in the "Squad Leader" slot of their Patrol Zone, then the attacking unit or hero cannot attack any units or heroes in the other slots in the Patrol Zone. Finally, the abilities Flying, Invisibility and Unattackable can in some circumstances prevent defending units from being legal choices for an attacker.

Now since the game is asynchronous, there are no "instants", and only the active player can use spells and activated abilities. This means that there are far fewer "combat tricks", and, much more importantly -- what combat tricks there are can only be used by the attacking player.

Advantage: Offense

So in Codex, the attacking player gets to pick (nearly) all creature combat matchups and also gets to be the only one who can use non-creature spells and activated effects to perform combat tricks. Those are a pair of truly massive advantages on the offensive side. While Codex retains and renames MtG's idea of "summoning sickness" to give the defender a one turn deployment advantage, the prior two advantages are so huge that they can in some cases invert the defensive advantage of a one-turn delay on new arrivals attacking. If an attacker has relevant evasion abilities and/or viable blocker-removal effects, then they can truly select all matchups and therefore any newly-arrived units or heroes must survive their worst current matchup before such newly arrive units or heroes have a chance to select more advantageous matchups or use any abilities which require tapping exhausting.

On top of that, damage in Codex is cumulative from turn-to-turn, so advantageous creature combat setups one turn are likely to snowball into continued advantageous creature combat in future turns.

All of this works together to make exhausting a card to activate an ability a much much steeper cost than it is in MtG and to make Haste and various evasion abilities much much better in Codex than their equivalents are in MtG. But I'll get into that next time when I go over the list of keywords and what each actually means to the game.

Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Sat Apr 16, 2016 5:40 pm; edited 5 times in total

Next up, I'm going over every Keyword given in the Codex rulebook, covering their game usefulness, wacky interactions and design implications:

Keywords Part I:Armor-Illusion

Armor: This is more complex than it needs to be. It basically provides a unit or hero with what in 3e D&D terms would be temporary hit points. This ability does help units and heroes survive creature combat, which is useful, but can be negated in a couple of different ways. The interaction between the +1 Armor granted by the Squad Leader position in the Patrol Zone and various spells and abilities which move defenders around and/or place -1/-1 runes on enemies is a frequent source of confusion to new players. It would have been a lot cleaner design to replace this with a more-powerful "regeneration" type ability which allowed a unit or hero to heal fully at the end of turn - the way it works for everybody over in MtG.

Armor Piercing: This is a specific ability which gives the unit or hero possessing it the ability to deal damage which bypasses armor. This is really minor value for added complexity. While there are edge cases where this can be significant, the majority of the time in actual games, this is going to be identical to a hypothetical ability which would read "+1 when attacking opposing Squad Leaders", which is really so bullshit small that it's wasting text on the card. Either give the unit or hero "Frenzy: 1" if you want a small attack bonus, give it "Deathtouch" if you want it to be something to avoid combat with, or let it hand out -1/-1 runes if you want it to cause combat damage to have slightly more severe consequences than usual.

Arrives: Do X This is basically the same functionality, but with cleaner phrasing than MtG's "Enters the Battlefield" terminology. Sadly, sloppy wording elsewhere causes a fair bit of confusion in conjunction with cards that can be physically on the table but not actually "in play" yet - such as cards with Forecast and interactions with theBlue Starter Building "Jail".

Anti-Air: see my entry for Flying, below

Attacks: Do X Much the same as MtG. I don't have a problem with functionality, but rules regarding order of operations and legal targets could stand to be made a bit more explicit. Things actually work so that "Attacks: Do X" effects happen before any type of combat damage and that"Attacks: Do X" effects can have totally different targeting restrictions than those of attack decisions. For example: if you have a hypothetical unit which has "Attacks: Deal one damage to an enemy unit", you could attack an enemy Patroller which is Untargetable and then apply the "Attacks" effect against an enemy unit which is Unattackable.

Boost: Do X. This is a lot like MtG's "Kicker" mechanic. You have a card that does something for gold Cost N and does an additional something for gold cost N+X Again, a bit of timing confusion results from circumstances where cards with Boost do not Arrive immediately, and a bit more results from circumstances where a unit with Boost is put into play in some way other than paying its gold cost and playing from hand.

Channeling: This is a tag for Ongoing spells. A spell tagged with Channeling only stays in play so long as you control the associated Hero for that spell. Thus, Channeling spells can be ended via punching the right person.

Deathtouch: Another ability that works like the ability of the same name in MtG. If a unit with Deathtouch deals any damage to an opposing unit or hero, than that damage is lethal. Of minor note that Deathtouch kills enemies even if the Deathtouch damage is only dealt to Armor.

In a massive flavor headscratcher, the apparently normal Porcupine possesses this ability:

Each quill is deadly, so I guess Codex is set in Australia

Detector: This keyword negates opposing Stealth and Invisible abilities. The wordings and ruling on the most commonly used cards are really really counter-intuitive here -- and I'm not even going to begin to explain them here. It's worth note that this shows up on a couple of cards which a neither units nor heroes.

Dies: Do X. Fairly self-explanatory, but does get a little weird with rulings on things that go to non-standard zones when they die for various reasons, but those can generally be puzzled out if the FAQ is consulted.

Disable a Unit or Hero: The lack of a term for {Unit or hero} continues to be an embarrassment here. This means to Exhaust (tap) the card -- which pulls it out of the Patrol zone -- and also prevents it from Readying (untapping) normally next turn. Reasonable in balance, but the one-turn no untappy dealio means you need to mark the card somehow, adding accounting, which is an outright design failure, and this ability just should not exist in its current form. The problem is that with the asynchronous game play, merely tapping out an opposing {Unit or Hero} Icy Manipulator style is a lot less useful than in MtG, and a purely offensive ability. In the game, "Disable" is primarily found on Blue cards as and meant to be used as part of a stall-plan, so the extra turn of staying tapped out is an attempt to make it an ability with defensive use. Except it's a design failure, since this exact problem is fucking solved in another spec

Bam. Wow, look at that, a lockdown card that jolly well stays in play indicating the unit so locked down and not requiring additional tokens or markers. Since the lack of instants means that the Blue Defensive ability you wanted can't work defensively if it's just a rip of Icy Manipulator, you should have ripped off Calming Licid or Amber Prison -- but as Sirlin apparently only knows enough MtG to mock the prices of cards he instead doubled down on the stupid here.

Ephemeral This means that the unit dies at end of turn. It also means that anything with Ephemeral is nigh-useless unless it has Haste. AFAIK, all printed Ephemeral units do come with Haste.
Firstly, things should have been rejiggered to just make this a subset of Fading. That would allow combos with Time Rune stuff and allow for more interesting game play. There's also a couple of missed design opportunities here. First off, a spell or effect which granted both Ephemeral and Haste to any unit on the board would be a great dual-threat, letting you speed attack with your own stuff or serving as removal which didn't actually remove in time to clear a path for your current attack -- but all the stuff which grants both to other cards applies only to your own stuff and the one spell that should work like that just deals 1 damage at end of turn. And secondly, a massively undercosted unit with Ephemeral but which had to get Haste from somewhere else would be a great combo component.

Fading This works very similar to MtG's Fading. There are some timing issues with Codex's version, as in Codex you sacrifice the card when you remove the final Time Rune instead of at the start of your next upkeep, and that leads into some hyper-semantic rules issues. The bigger deal is that unlike MTG, damage in Codex is cumulative from turn to turn, meaning that all units and heroes you have in play are only likely to last a few turns anyways - so giving something a "drawback" that it is temporary is often meaningless and Fading units therefore tend to be pretty good value cards. Also, there's the faction design problem that Time Rune stuff is to restricted to a single color, and therefore going multicolor with those Specs loses massive amounts of synergy.

Flying: According to Sirlin "This works like it does in RTS games" according to many casual players - "WTF? How does that even?" This one is a strong, but not-game breaking ability but the interactions show just how insular playtesting was, because feedback from a single blind playtest group would have revealed that the rules interactions were a Gordian Knot of unacceptable confusion. Here's the breakdown, in a bullet point format which is painfully lengthy in order to be both more clear and a lot more detailed than what is given in the rulebook:

Flying is an evasion ability that some units (and exactly one hero, and in one case your base can) have.

Flying units/hero/your base may ignore enemy patrollers (unless those patrollers have Flying or Anti-Air). Ignoring those patrollers due to Flying is called "Flying Over"

Non-Flying units/heroes with Anti-Air can choose whether or not to ignore flying Patrollers

Flying units/hero can still Fly Over non-flying patrollers with Anti-Air and attack something behind the patrol zone. In which case each patroller which has Anti-Air will deal combat damage to the flier as the same time that the flier deals its attacking combat damage. That is unless other abilities (Swift Strike) change damage timing or prevent damage (Long Range) for attacker or Patroller.

While non-flying units/heroes which lack Anti-Air cannot "attack" Flying units/hero/base, they can still deal "combat damage" to them in the case of abilities which allow "combat damage" to be dealt to additional defending cards -- this seems to just be the Sparkshot ability, but I could be missing something else.

If a Flying attacker also has Stealth or Invisibility (and the defender cannot detect it), then the attacker can use that evasion ability to bypass Patrollers with Anti-Air, taking no damage from them.

If a Flying attack with Stealth or Invisibility specfically attacks an opposing Unit/Hero with Anti-Air, that defender still deals combat damage to the Flying attacker.

If the defender has the Tower add-on built, then "the tower deals 1 combat damage to each enemy attacker that it can see (at the same time that attacker deals combat damage). It has anti-air, so it can hit fliers too". Note that abilities which change combat damage timing such as Swift Strike or potentially prevent combat damage such as Long Range do not apply in interactions with the Add-ons, and the Tower damage is always dealt simultaneously.

Contrast to MtG where there are just three clear and concise bullet points and understanding is pretty intuitive

From the Comprehensive Rules wrote:

702.9. Flying
702.9a Flying is an evasion ability.
702.9b A creature with flying can’t be blocked except by creatures with flying and/or reach. A creature with flying can block a creature with or without flying. (See rule 509, “Declare Blockers Step,” and rule 702.17, “Reach.”)
702.9c Multiple instances of flying on the same creature are redundant.

or if you want to have a fliers can't block non-fliers, and ground guys can't block fliers situation you can use

From the Comprehensive Rules wrote:

702.27. Shadow
702.27a Shadow is an evasion ability.
702.27b A creature with shadow can’t be blocked by creatures without shadow, and a creature without shadow can’t be blocked by creatures with shadow. (See rule 509, “Declare Blockers Step.”)
702.27c Multiple instances of shadow on the same creature are redundant.

Again, just three bullet points. Not ten. Three.

Now unlike MtG, there is a real dearth of Earthbind / Hurricane / Gravity Sphere - type effects in Codex. Aside from units with Anti-Air, there is only one card which removes flying from an enemy card and nothing that globally punishes fliers..

Since in Codex, the attacker gets to choose what they are attacking (unless restricted by defending patrollers), evasion abilities are big deal, allowing an attacker to go not merely for the kill, but to prioritize taking out the squishy-yet-important parts of the opponent's board. And since in Codex all units/heroes/buildings suffer from ablative HP, Fliers ability to attack without taking punishment damage is huge. A Flying attacker against an opponent without any Flying or Anti-Air patrollers is basically a reusable direct damage spell, which works out to a pretty powerful ability and something that you need to have answers for within any Specs you choose to combine for your deck --- but damn it takes way too much rulesplaining to set that all up.

Forecast This is similar to, but unitentionally stupider than MtG's Suspend mechanic. When you first play a card with forecast it goes into the future and gets a number of Time Counters on it. Each turn you remove a time counter, and when you remove the last it actually enters play. At the rules level, there are problems with just where Forecast cards are. They are not "in play" but are instead "In the future", and therefore cannot be targeted or otherwise affected save by things which specifically target "forecast cards". And of course, there are various effects which allow you to put a card "into play" in nonstandard ways, and it is completely non-obvious whether such effects allow you to get a Forecast unit into play skipping the waiting for the Future to get here part or whether the Time Rune stuff happens no matter how the card hit the table

How these cards interact is not in the rulebook. You'll have to search online.

Also, there's the faction design problem that Time Rune stuff is to restricted to a single color, and therefore going multicolor with those Specs loses massive amounts of synergy.

Frenzy X While that would be a decent name for a Alt-Metal band, it'sreally a small offensive boost ability, which grants any unit or hero possessing it +X attack only on your turn. For most cards, X is just 1. So most of the time this is a way to balance out a unit by giving it a +1 which only applies half the time - being about equivalent to a half a stat point.

Haste This is the same ability as MtG's Haste. Due to the other differences between the games, I touched on in my prior post, it's massively better in Codex. Having Haste is Trumpian Yuge in Codex - even merely having the potential to have something haste within your deck changes how your opponent should assign their Patrollers.

Healing: X Units and heroes accumulate damage and it stays there until the card leaves play or the damage is healed. The is the ability to heal. You might think that it works like MtG Regeneration, or at least like MtG's no-ability creature reset-damage between turns. But you would be wrong, because that would be both simple and generally useful, so Codex design goes the other way. Instead X is a number and during your upkeep, a healer automagically heals that number of damage from *all* friendly units and heroes during your next upkeep. So if you have a healer survive a turn and if you have multiple other units survive a turn, then you can recover multiple points of damage to your forces, but most of the time it's a stronger defensive play to just play a patroller with better stats than it is to try to set up healing combos. I am aware that Sirlin hates the concept of in-game healing as a game-slower, but I do not understand the thought process behind implementing it this way.

Illusion Illusion is a tag on some cards (and which can be given to others) which means they die when hit by any targeted ability. And here targeted means "which explictly has the ◎ symbol printed on it". Inexplicably, the Illusion tag does not count as an ability:

When this combo was to powerful, banned from use, the fix was to nerf Midori rather than to re-interpret the keyword to prevent the combo.

All fixed now!! You have to pay 1 for a 4/4 instead of getting a 5/5 for 0.

Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Apr 20, 2016 5:52 pm; edited 1 time in total

Arrives: Do X This is basically the same functionality, but with cleaner phrasing than MtG's "Enters the Battlefield" terminology. Sadly, sloppy wording elsewhere causes a fair bit of confusion in conjunction with cards that can be physically on the table but not actually "in play" yet - such as cards with Forecast and interactions with theBlue Starter Building "Jail".

It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

It seems like a lot of the cruft in Flying could be fixed by splitting off the ability to dive past Patrollers and attack shit in the back row into a separate ability.

Commando: This unit may attack any valid target as though there were no Patrolling Units. If it does so, ALL Patrolling Units get to deal their combat damage to This Unit as though it attacked them. If This Unit has Flying, only Patrollers with Flying or Anti Air can deal damage to it in this way.

That conditional is a bit clunky, but it removes about half of the junk from Flying and gives you the kamikaze feature in less than ten lines of text total._________________

Koumei wrote:

...is the dead guy posthumously at fault for his own death and, due to the felony murder law, his own murderer?

hyzmarca wrote:

A palace made out of poop is much more impressive than one made out of gold. Stinkier, but more impressive. One is an ostentatious display of wealth. The other is a miraculous engineering feat.

Disable a Unit or Hero: The lack of a term for {Unit or hero} continues to be an embarrassment here. This means to Exhaust (tap) the card -- which pulls it out of the Patrol zone -- and also prevents it from Readying (untapping) normally next turn. Reasonable in balance, but the one-turn no untappy dealio means you need to mark the card somehow, adding accounting, which is an outright design failure, and this ability just should not exist in its current form.

Do you really need to mark the card ? Can't you turn it by 180°, then during upkeep you turn it by 90° and it is still tapped until next upkeep ?

FrankTrollman wrote:

GâtFromKI wrote:

So a 4-gold, tech 2 card can be a countermeasure for a 0-gold, tech 0 card ? How does that work ? Does Law have some green-like turbo-gold/turbo-tech stuff ?

Well, it can be a countermeasure for a strategy tat uses a tech 0 gold 0 card. If you play card draw you necessarily have to have your curve set up to play multiple cards a tirn. So if something happens where you can't do that, you're stuck with a hand full of shit you can't play and a pile of gold doing nothing. But as I understand it, everyone gets a mana sink in the form of levelling heroes, so that kind of prison strategy basically can't work.

-Frank

As I understand, Tech 2 units and buildings come late in the game, and most game should end at tech 2 (since the only upgrade after that is a single "you win" creature). At that point you should have some combo to stop your opponent from playing, not just a card that slow him down a bit if he has a fast deck. Actually, at that point, if a fast deck can't destroy your tech 2 building and prevent you from playing any tech 2 card, it should be a good sign that you have stalled enough to prevent him from winning.

But I'm not sure I really understand the tempo of the game.

Last edited by GâtFromKI on Fri Apr 22, 2016 7:39 am; edited 1 time in total

Indestructible You cannot sacrifice an indestructible unit. If it would die, you instead tap it and remove all damage and attachments from it. This is simple in concept, and a decent tactical puzzle - you can't "kill" such a unit so you need access to something like evasion abilities, bounce (return to hand) effects or a way to sideline it. But it ends up being problematic due to rules interactions. Note the lack of any "attachment" keyword in my prior post, so which cards which fall off when an indestructible unit not-dies requires a bunch of head scratching, extra close parsing and online rules lookups.

Only one of these buffs is an "attachement"

Also, there's a minor rules hiccup of just what happens with the one combo that can give an Indestructible unit Ephemeral.

Invisible Unless your opponent has a Detector, Invisible units are Untargetable, Unattackable and someone forgot to use the "Unstoppable" keyword when he wrote the index, even though it works like that. An Invisible patroller is Attackable while patrolling. If your opponent has a Detector, Invisibility does nothing. But note that there are only two and a half Detectors in the entire card set, and only the Truth II option is a full-on always detecting detector.

The Discipline spell only gives you a Detector until the end of (your) turn - not even until next upkeep to let you block for a single turn, and the everybody-can-buy Tower add-on only Detects one enemy per turn - although that is per each player turn -- which gets a tad weird with rulings needed for asynchronous play where only the active player makes decisions.

Leaves: Do X Just like MtG's "Leaves the Battlefield" abilities - save for Codex's timing rules prioritizing asynchronous play so the the active player always gets to decide the order of otherwise simulates events. A real opportunity was missed here:

Just sayin': this game has "tree" as a card type and "Leaves" as an ability keyword....

Legendary: Very close to, but not exactly the same as MtG's "Legend" tag. You can't have 2 of the same Legendary unit, building or upgrade in play at once, the second one gets discarded. Unlike (Old) MtG, both you and your opponent can have a copy. Worth pointing out that other rules of the game mean that all Heroes work exactly like this, although they do not actually get the tag.

Long-Range: "Defenders without long range deal no damage to this when it attacks". This only applies on offense and is partly like Swift Strike and partly like Flying. By my count, it's also only on three cards - so it probably should just have been cut in the name of simplicity. What it adds to the game's tactical puzzle is just not worth the additional keyword memorization nor lookup.

Max Level: Do X This tag is for abilities which trigger a single time when the hero possessing the ability reaches their maximum level. Max Level abilities which apply continuously or which can be activated multiple times by tapping or paying another cost do not get this tag.

Obliterate: X This is a "game over" ability in Codex. It's only on a fair number of Tech IIIs and one single "can-you-overcome the drawback" Tech II. It's a Attacks: Do N ability where N is "destroy the defender's X lowest tech units". Unless I'm missing something, X is either 2 or 4 on all current cards. So attacking with an Obliterate unit destroys at least two opposing units before you get to combat damage.

Overpower Kinda like MtG's Trample, but just different enough to confuse MtG players. An attacker with Overpower that kills a Patroller (and only a Patroller) gets to assign excess damage dealt to one (and only one) other unit /hero / building which would be legal for the attacker to have attacked. I just found a new edge-case timing question not explicitly answered in any current online info yet while writing this, so once again, things could stand to be clarified.

Readiness Just like MtG's vigilance. Strong, but not as strong as it is in MtG due to the ablative nature of everything in Codex

Resist: X Opponents must pay X gold everytime they would target this with a spell or ability.
Of course "target" has a very rules-specific meaning, and only cards with the ◎ icon on them count here. This really should be rephrased as "Resist: +X", since the ability does stack with itself, is common and is granted by one of the five patrol slots, so that question has already arisen multiple times online. It probably also wouldn't hurt to have the rulebook index entry point out that the gold is paid back into the bank and not to the owner of the card with Resist

Sacrifice a thing

That particular phrasing in the index does lend itself to easy mockery.

Sacrifice works much like in MtG, but the wording is a bit less explicit. Get rid of something you have. Sacrifice explicitly does not target.

This totally ignores Resist and Untargetable

Sideline a unit or hero This just means to move it out of the patrol zone. So effectively it's not blocking after it is Sidelined.

Sparkshot An common mini-buff ability which should be replaced with something else in many instances. When an attacker with Sparkshot attacks a patroller, Sparkshot deals 1 point of damage to a patroller in an adjacent patrol slot. While it does make a defender reconsider patrol assignments, it generally works out to something like "1 point of extra damage" once or maybe twice per game. Also, since this is Codex, it's not merely a minor ability, but it's a minor ability with oddball timing that's not explicit in the rulebook. Sparkshot is not an "Attacks: do X" ability, but is instead "combat damage", but it's combat damage which can be assigned to things which you cannot normally attack. So an attacking ground unit can deal Sparkshot damage to a patrolling flyer.

Stash I'm kidding. This keyword does not appear in the Index nor anywhere in the rulebook. It does however appear on a card though. Seems pisspoor editing that said card uses the keyword with reminder text instead of just using the reminder text as the ability explanation. But hey, what sort of quality can you expect with ten years of playtesting and only $350k of presales.

Stealth An attacker with Stealth can ignore patrollers if the defender has no detector. Note that the only detectors an opponent can have during your attack are the Truth II upgrade or the Tower, which only detects the first Stealth/Invisible attacker each turn. So if you have two Stealth or Invisible dudes, the second one is unblockable at all times in well over 95% of games, and a significant amount of the time in the remaining 5%. Note also that, Stealth doesn't have the defensive parts of Invisibility so your opponent will either try to kill your Stealth forces or outdamage you in a no-defense base race.

Swift Strike Just like MtG's First-Strike, save for the ways in which the timing rules in the two games differ.

Trash

.
Works like in Puzzle Strike, "Trash" means to remove from game. The index notes that even Indestructible units can be trashed.

Unattackable A unit, hero or building with Unattackable cannot be attacked. Can still be ◎ with spells, abilities or removed by global effects.

Unstoppable An attacker with Unstoppable ignores patrollers and can attack whatever the fuck the attacker wants without restriction. A fair number of things have conditional unstoppable abilities. (in addition to that being how the aforementioned Stealth and Invisibility work) Examples include: Unstoppable when attacking Heroes; Unstoppable by units with -1/-1 runes; Unstoppable by Patrol Zones with only 1 Patroller; Unstoppable when attacking a base

Untargetable An untargetable card cannot be targeted with ◎ spells nor abilities. It can still be "selected" for spells and abilities which lack the specific ◎ targeting icon.

Upkeep: Do X The index helpfully elaborates that this means "During your upkeep, do X." It probably should have also reiterated that the active player decides the order between things that otherwise happen at the same time. And heck, some clarification about how upkeep effects work with lent patrollers in the Free For All game mode might also have been a good idea.

up next A the first in a series of one-by-one looks through all twenty Specs for design failures and the occasional success.

Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Apr 27, 2016 5:45 am; edited 8 times in total

Fuck the Buddha, the rules to this game are either not written down and/or do not mean what they say -- so I have to rant a bit more about things I missed in my above posts.

Two Lives Like Stash, this keyword appears on cards but does not get a mention in the rulebook. I guess Sirlin's Mac preference means he can't use Ctrl-F.

The reminder text helps, and it's not like the rulebook would clarify Plague lab or Sidelining interactions anyways

And Finally I have a really weaselly mea culpa: Apparently I was wrong about the interaction between the single unit (Pirate Gunship) with both Flying and Long-Range Flying Over units with Anti Air (but which do not have Long Range themselves)

You see, I just read this part:

rulebook wrote:

Long-range: Defenders without long-range deal no damage to this
when it attacks.

Which seems pretty clear that an attacking Long Range Flyer takes no damage from opposing Units / Heroes with anti-air.

But I didn't read this part:

rulebook wrote:

Anti-air Can attack fliers, but can ignore patrolling fliers. Deals combat damage to fliers it fights or that fly over this while it patrols.

Which seems pretty clear that that "flying over" part of Anti-Air happens regardless of Long Range or not.

While I would call those outright contradictory rules which need to be resolved, that's only because, like most players I don't have access to the triple-secret rules of Sirlin's hometown fanclub.

Apparently "Defender" actually has a specific game meaning that isn't actually defined anywhere but is "Unit / Hero which is currently being attacked". Of the three times "Defender" appears in the rulebook, this meaning is strongly implied on page 4, ambigious in the Long Range entry quoted above (page 19) and outright contradicted in the Obliterate entry (page 20) - where "defender" clearly refers to the player whose forces are being attacked. Silly me, expecting rules to be in the rulebook and words to mean things.

Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Sep 14, 2016 4:39 pm; edited 7 times in total

Up next, my reviews of each and every Spec in the game. I'm going to go in the reverse order Sirlin posted them to his blog Linky because that's top down order on his page and because it probably provides better context for stuff which comes later:

Unique Mechanic: Forecast, which is a lot like MtG's Suspend. When you first play a card with forecast it goes into the future and gets a number of Time Counters on it. Each turn you remove a time counter, and when you remove the last it actually enters play. At the risk of being too kind to Sirlin, the Forecast mechanic is pure feculence design within the context of Codex.

At the conceptual level, this sort of thing lets you use game turns as a resource, allowing you to have cards that have time costs in place of other costs. Except Codex is a private-pool deckbuilder where you are continually improving your deck from turn to turn by removing your weakest cards from your deck to make Workers and by drafting better cards from your Codex into your deck each turn.

Also, Codex makes rather a big deal about Tech Buildings and the Tech levels of cards -- so that every two to four turns the best unit you can play will become one tech level higher than it was previously. This means that for units Forecast to be balanced against other units they have to be roughly a whole tech level better, since the Forecast units won't arrive until the opponent has the ability to play units from the next higher tech level. Except Forecast units can't be a whole Tech level better, because there are effects which let you remove time counters and have Forecast units show up in fewer turns. So Forecast units are too weak if they aren't better than current Tech level units and Forecast units are problematically strong if they are as good as the next tech level units. This is a very narrow design space, and unsurprisingly Codex does not manage to thread the needle of having Forecast cards good enough to compete against the higher tech non-forecast units which start showing up in the turns when Forecast units arrive naturally nor is a Forecast unit which has had resources spent to speed its arrival up adequately balanced against what a same tech non-Forecast unit which has had an equivalent amount of cards and gold invested into buffing it.

At the rules level, there are problems with just where Forecast cards are. They are not "in play" but are instead "In the future", and therefore cannot be targeted or otherwise affected save by things which specifically target "forecast cards". Guess what, everything which can affect a "forecast card" is in either the Purple starter or the Past Spec -- thus you lose significant synergy if you go multicolor, and the game has fewer competitively viable combinations than it should. Remember that phrase, it's going to show up in a lot of these Spec reviews.

Hero:

Vir Garbanzobean (the surname is actually something a bit less memorable)

Stats and costs: he starts out at the standard beefy 2/3 startband, but it takes 5 more gold to get him to a meh 3/3 midband and 7 gold to get him to a still meh 3/5 maxband. That makes his stats beyond startband,just barely good enough to consider fighting with, but on the expensive side, so he's a hero you want for the combination of stats+Abilities.

Hero Innates:

At Startband Vir has two abilities. First it lets you look at the top card of your deck for free, and it also lets you pay one gold to swap a card from your hand with the top card of your deck. Sadly, rules wordings for this game prevent either ability from actually cycling your discard and reshuffling your deck, as anyone who has played other deckbuilders would expect, so that's needless confusion.

At Midband, Vir gets a Tap-to-Play the top card of your deck, but you still must meet requirements and pay costs for it. The only possible reason why it couldn't have jolly well just been tap-to-draw is because it is intentional design decision for it not to work when you have zero cards remaining in your deck and all your cards in hand + discard. If that seems both needless rules niggling to achieve a design goal of a really arbitrary limitation on the ability's scope - congrats you can join me in being unable to point that sort of thing out on the game's official forums.

Remember that the no-out-of-turn effects design of Codex means that tapping is a much steeper cost than in MtG, as Tapped Units/Heroes will not be able to even threaten to block; so this cardflow advantage ability does have significant cost to use.

For the sake of comparison, here's Setsuki again

Not even one of the top tier heroes in Codex

Note Setsuki she hits her maxband at only 6 additional gold, compared to the 5 gold for Vir to hit his midband. Setsuki's maxband provides +2 cardflow per turn while still allowing her to attack or patrol. Note also that maxband Setsuki comes with 3/4 stats to midband Vir's 3/3 stats while maxband Sets also has conditional tax to attack her and conditional first Swift Strike while midband Vir has "look at top card", pay (1) to "exchange hand card with top card" and "tap to play top card for normal costs". One of those is a versatile hero with a strong ability. The other costs 1 less gold and has pretty much the same ability broken into three pieces.

Vir's Maxband is an activate-upon-reaching-maxband ability which summons a kinda beefy untargettable mech token with Forecast 2. Oh and by the way, every effect in the game which can manipulate time runes on something else, refers to adding or removing them from "a card", so by the rules-as-written you cannot manipulate time runes on "tokens". Although this is probably getting errata'ed, real soon now -- it is entirely the sort of thing I expect to be noticed in playtesting well before the ten year mark.

Spells:Promise of Payment: This is a weird little combo spell. It costs zero and lets the next card you play also cost zero. But then you have to pay the following turn or you outright lose the game. It's not generally good, but it is an answer to a lot of theoretical questions and puzzles.

Unphase: A solid utility spell. This grants a unit or hero Invisibility until your next turn. While it's paying a card for a temporary buff, that sort of evasion ability can let you take out an opponent's key backline unit or tech building while also protecting your unit or hero from most enemy actions for a turn.

Assimilate: This spell is pretty much the reason to play Future. "Gain control of an Upgrade, Ongoing Spell, or Building Card (not Add-on). This is one of 5 cards in all of Codex which can do something about an opposing Upgrade that is already in play, and of the other 4, one self-trashes, another merely discards the opposing Upgrade and the remaining 2 require having Specced Tech II Balance. It's also the only card outside of Balance or Tech IIIs which can directly remove an opponent's Ongoing spell from play. On top of that, it's an even bigger a puzzle-answer spell than Promise of Payment since it lets you theoretically assimilate out-of-spec things to set up otherwise impossible hypothetical combos.

Ultimate Spell: Double Time Vir's Ultimate is a Time Walk that manages to be pretty unimpressive in practice. But it costs 6 gold and comes with Forecast 3. So you need to have a Maxband Vir (total cost to get there 9) start the turn on your side, then you need to pay another 6 gold. And then you either need to wait 3 more turns, or use 3 other card effects to get it to activate. For purposes of comparison, the Fire Hero can be summoned for 2 gold, and another 14 gold and four cards worth of non-ultimate burn spells will do 13 immediate damage to an opponent's base - and current thinking is that Fire and direct damage are underpowered in this game.

Tech I: Future's tech I has the interesting but Uselss Knight of the Conclave, which is a 0 cost 4/4 with Resist I but hosed by Forecast 3, and more importantly Gilded Gaxx which is a 3/4 for 3 - which is basically fair for a Tech I

Tech I unit comparison

but we also get to the really interesting conditional ability of being immune to death (or bounce or exile) from anything but combat damage so long its controller has at least one gold remaining. This has all sorts of interesting combo potential - it survives board-sweeps, illusory duplicates of it don't die from the things which normally pop illusions, etc.

Tech II and III:

Future II has 2 ignorable Forecast units -- one of which would win you the game if it ever would actually enter play the other of which has an ability to sacrifice things to speed up the Forecast, and therefore might sometimes enter play in actual games -- but it's still not quite good enough. But you are probably going to forget about those and instead go for the two big fliers. Void Star is a 5-cost 5/4 Flying Trample Overpower unit that firebreathes up to a 9/4, meaning that an opponent without a means to kill it or block fliers is 90% to lose two turns after it hits the board, and even if they can block it, they are still highly likely to lose a tech building. Hive is a 6-cost carrier that arrives with five 1/1 flying tokens and has the ability to resummon any of those tokens which are lost each turn, which pretty much means that an opponent without token-clearing or a lot of anti-air defenses is going to take some flying chip damage to their most important backline units and buildings. Hive being 6 units for one card has a couple of really strong, if-hard-to pull off multicolor combos with "buff all" effects in other specs.

Buff all effects with flying tokens is a strong threat in Codex

The final card in Future II is a 3/6 Unstoppable unit with chump-clearing lasers, which isn't bad, but you're only going to want it instead of the fliers in situations where its lower gold cost matters.

Future's Tech III is just a bit better than middle of the road for tech a III. Like all Tech III's it's a win condition. This one wins immediately if and only if you already have the relevant advantage on the board, probably wins in one turn if the opponent cannot answer it and provides a modicum of reversal if you are slightly behind when it arrives.

Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Mon May 09, 2016 6:22 pm; edited 7 times in total

The flavour of Future is not "vaguely UFO-ish Mecha", it is "Let's steal the most iconic Protoss robots stuff from Starcraft I/II to make half the units and then add some generic and extremely boring humanoids to fill out the other half"

Zero cost 7nits with forecast of any number would be great if it wasn't for the card drawing engine. Because you only draw a full hand if you spent 2 cards or less, playing a zero cost card necessarily means that one of three things happen: you reduce the rate you go through your deck by one card per turn for the rest of the game, you don't play a worker and reduce your income for one per turn for the rest of the game, or you save all your gold and don't play anything that has a cost that turn.

Options 1 and 2 are basically unacceptable unless you are about to win, which Forecast won't help with. Option 3 is possibly worth considering if dumping your income on heroes is a viable life choice. In short, 0 cost forecast units are best looked at as a triggered bonuses for having mana sinks. And everyone gets mana sinks in the form of heroes.

Yeah, of the possible designs which could make Forecast neither sucky nor overpowered, balancing Forecast units by replacing Gold (ie mana) cost with Turn cost is far and away an easier target to hit than the other possibilities. Especially considering that unspent gold in Codex is carried over from turn to turn.

And while zero-cost units run into problems with the cardflow engine, there are card-draw effects in the game to compensate. At the moment, this combo is rocking the Meta

Spend 2 life, gain a 2/2 Unit and faster cycling

GreatGreyShrike wrote:

^ Correction to your review:

The flavour of Future is not "vaguely UFO-ish Mecha", it is "Let's steal the most iconic Protoss robots stuff from Starcraft I/II to make half the units and then add some generic and extremely boring humanoids to fill out the other half"

Wight, wight

I'm sorry. It's not because I've never actually played Starcraft that I missed that -- the rip off is even obvious more than that and I should have pointed it out in my post. The actual name of the Purple faction is Codex is the Vorlon, er Protoss er Vortoss Conclave. It is because rips are so obvious and poorly done that I have fully internalized them and forgot to give them their due mockery.

Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Tue May 10, 2016 6:21 pm; edited 6 times in total